Conventionally, there has been known an image processing apparatus that binarizes a character area in an image for each RGB component value. When a character in the character area is represented by black pixels, the image processing apparatus combines the binarized RGB image data by logical AND operation. When a character in the character area is represented by white pixels, the image processing apparatus inverts the binarized RGB image data and them combines them by logical AND operation. It is said that these allow only a character image to be extracted reliably.